Mary Jo Kopechne, 29, a former secretary to Senator Kennedy’s late brother Robert was also in the car. Kennedy escaped. He fled. He left Mary Jo Kopechne in the car. Ten hours later he reported the accident. And Mary Jo was dead.

Let us not judge the man on one action. Oh no. Kennedy would later stand for the US presidency, a man bigger than a dead girl in a car. As for that incident, he claimed to have been in a state of shock. He was judged by his peers, pleading guilty to leaving the scene of a crime and given a two-month suspended jail sentence.

Now the nodding heads in the mainstream media looks back on Kennedy’s life, replacing the ink with an airbrush:

It’s often said that Kennedy spoke for the distressed and the dispossessed because he himself had suffered – the deaths of siblings, eventually the sickness of his own children – and because his powers of empathy were extreme.

In July 1969, the single most damaging incident of his life took place when he left a party on an island called Chappaquiddick with Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old former aide to Bobby, and drove off a bridge into the water. Afraid of the publicity a police report would cause, he fled the scene and left Kopechne to die, not reporting the accident until 10 hours later.

Hold your judgment. And lest you make your own judgment, Gaby Wood provides you with one, that you should accept as fact and never think on the matter again:

His friend the late Jack Newfield wrote that his career became “an atonement for one night of indefensible behaviour”; Kennedy, Newfield said, “converted persistence into redemption”.

Ted Sorensen in Time magazine:

“Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.”

IN DEATH, Ted Kennedy will be idealized, his accomplishments lionized, his weaknesses glossed over.

You betcha:

Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.

Kennedy the prophet. Kennedy the disciple. And not one mention of Mary Jo Kopechne by name.

A political career suggests “that there are not only “second acts” in American lives, but that the Renaissance concept of the “fortunate fall” may be relevant here: one “falls” as Adam and Eve “fell”; one sins and repents and is forgiven, provided that one remakes one’s life…

Mary Jo Kopechne was put on Earth to make Edward Kennedy, to give America a truly Kennedy-tastic senator.